I think part of why it's popular is that it's a sexier implementation of HTML, and as a writer, I found it frustrating to hand in edits to editors (for news web

I think part of why it's popular is that it's a sexier implementation of HTML, and as a writer, I found it frustrating to hand in edits to editors (for news websites) in Word format. Being able to give people a plain text version of my article and have it translate anywhere was/is amazing, and it's much smoother to write "" or "*" than it is to put "<em>" or "<strong>". I use Markdown a ton because it's easy to use converters to get that HTML code for blogs or have it built into plugins for Notepad++, Sublime or Atom.